Posted
by
Soulskill
on Wednesday November 30, 2011 @08:13AM
from the all-the-other-fruits-are-trademarked dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "Optimists says that if only America produced more companies like Apple and Amazon and Google and Facebook, the country's economic problems would be fixed — America could retrain its vast, idle construction-and-manufacturing workforce, and our unemployment and inequality problems would be solved. But Apple's $1 billion new data center in North Carolina has been a disappointing development for many residents, who can't comprehend how expensive facilities stretching across hundreds of acres can create only 50 new jobs, especially after thousands of positions in the region have been lost to cheaper foreign competition. In fact, Apple actually exemplifies some of the reasons why the U.S. has such huge unemployment and inequality problems: 'Digital' businesses like Apple employ far fewer people than traditional manufacturing businesses, Apple's 60,000+ jobs are not just in the U.S. — they're spread around the world. Companies like Apple 'create amazing products and vast shareholder wealth, but they don't spread this wealth around as much as earlier industrial giants did,' writes Henry Blodget. 'So, yes, we should celebrate the success of Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon. But we shouldn't delude ourselves into thinking they're going to solve our unemployment or inequality problems.'"

And, it should be pointed out, we have that - there are thousands of small tech businesses in all sorts of fields.

What happens, of course, is that some of them start building up successes, and then the vulture capitalists get involved, and then the business press goes gaga over them, and then there's a headline IPO, and then they aren't small tech businesses anymore. That's what happened to Microsoft, to Apple, to Google, and to Facebook. And if you are the founder of one of these thousands of small tech businesses, and you had the opportunity to take this kind of ride and make millions, would you really not take it?

Indeed. It's something of an oddity these days that there are so many tech companies that, instead of growing larger, are instead being bought out. That is to say, the game now is to build a company that gets bought out in (say) 5 years, not one that will last 200 years.

It's because the stock market is so pathetic. Economic incentive is to get bought out rather than tempt fate on a stock market that people have lost faith is in any way valuing things correctly. If the stock market were to somehow regain the public trust I bet we'd see far more IPOs and far less buyouts.

It's not the stock market. It's the legal system. Especially the patent system. If you're the little guy and you start to challenge the big guy, you get a nastygram to the effect of "this is a list of our patents that you're infringing. You can take a license for ONE BILLION DOLLARS, or you could just sell is your company and retire." Naturally the little guy doesn't have to sell his company to the bigger company. There is another option: He can sell his company to a different bigger company, which has sufficient defensive patents to tell the first bigger company to go to hell. Which is why the little guy can get good money -- the big guys will bid against each other for which one buys him out. There just isn't any option left of "remain an independent company."

It's another form of the lottery, pro-sports, famous actor/actress syndrome. Everybody sees it, everybody wants it, reality is that only a very very few can actually get it - if everybody got it, it wouldn't be desirable anymore.

Thousands of small businesses, or small business units of larger corporations, toil away toward the brass ring while only a few ever even come close to reaching it.

Just like the OWS 99% problem, the brass rings need to be more numerous and less shiny. The serfs (working poor, small businesses, etc.) are going to stop trying for them when it becomes apparent that they'll die before they ever get there.

It's another form of the lottery, pro-sports, famous actor/actress syndrome.

Difference being that these small companies actually produce something worthwhile while trying to strike gold.And for those that do get lucky, they normally deserve their new found riches much more than a girl with big tits who can emote on camera.

What we need is for the entire patent system to be thrown out since only the big companies have enough patents to be ALLOWED to innovate without fear of a lawsuit crushing their company out of existence. That is the REAL problem, where if you come up with an idea for a $5 product that would sell millions of units, yet you need to pay $50 per unit worth of legal fees to protect yourself from lawsuits.

Apple is a PERFECT example of this, where they will start lawsuits over their so-called intellectual proper

No, the point of competition is to sell your goods or services for less than it costs you to supply them. Eliminating a competitor can make that easier to do, because it's one way to increase your price without increasing your costs. However, there's a limit to how effective that can be so long as barriers to entry are low. You must keep your price low enough that it wouldn't profit a potential competitor to enter your market.

There is no point in competition for any business. None.Businesses are FORCED by antitrust laws to maintain a certain level of competition instead of simply eliminating it with any means possible.If they could get away with it they'd divide the pie into various noncompeting monopolies and live happily ever after.Perhaps buying off, or taking over or selling a monopoly or two here and there.And when you have an undisputed monopoly, you don't need to innovate or do research - so even friendly competition through research is simply a drain on your bottom line.

Competition has a point ONLY to the consumer.So, it is not "to sell your goods or services for less than it costs you to supply them" but for the customer to have the widest choice possible.Whether they choose according to price, quality, availability, variety, service, color... that is up to the (potential) customer.All 7 billion and counting of them.

Corporations, companies, businesses are not there "to create profit".Oh sure. Profit IS the motivation for the owner of the capital to create a business/company - through PROVIDING A PRODUCT OR SERVICE NEEDED BY THE SOCIETY.If there is no need for the product/service they are providing, there is no need for that kind of a company.And there is no motivation to create it as there is no profit to be made in things that nobody will buy.

In a perfect market, that should never happen. Just as there is supply and demand for the end product, there is supply and demand for the suppliers. If a company starts getting successful, new entrants will want to get in on the action. The trouble is that no market is perfect- commodities come close because there is little to no differentiation between the products, and buyers shop on mostly price alone. But every other market has some barrier to entry, and that's how monopolies form, and where regulat

It's definitely more complicated. But when Apple has more money than the government, you tend to think that maybe they could help out a little more. They don't need to make the same profits on the devices, they simply don't need to. They can take a revenue cut and still be very profitable, and be able to slap a little "Made In The USA" logo on their products. Consumers tend to be willing to spend a little more if they think they're helping out.

It is interesting how many people seem to see big businesses and major corporations. They have huge advertising budgets, and thanks to that, you see their logo EVERYWHERE. And they do employ a lot of people, at home and abroad, and support the development of great products (be they actual tangible products like the iPhone or Kindle, or more of a service, like Facebook. That being said, the backbone of any modern economy still lies in small businesses. And the big ones do support the little guys. Look at Apple's App Store, for example. Of the thousands of apps on there, how many of those apps were created and marketed by a small company of less than 100-200 people (or even how many apps were put out by a one-man-shop)? Remember also, that many of these big corporate giants started as small businesses -- Apple and HP both started in a garage in silicon valley.

Most small businesses are support business for large business. It is absolutely the case in the US that their is mobility between businesses, small businesses grow and large business often shrink. However this can take quite a bit of time and really doesn't change the fact that big business is the ultimate engine.

I call hogwash on this meme of "small business is the backbone of America".Granted, I don't get out as much as I used to, but I have been to quite a few parts of America, and that simply hasn't been the case in any of them.

I live in the deep south. I have to drive through numerous small/medium sized semi-rural or commuter type towns to get anywhere.Here's what you see almost every time:

1) The nicest building in town: The JailMy guess is that's probably either a side effect of 9/11 paranoia funding, or privatization + drug war funding. But this is the case in a *shockingly* large number of towns I've driven through lately. And it is super depressing.

2) the second nicest building in town: The Hospitalpresuming they have one. Otherwise... move on to #3

3) Wal-Mart (or sometimes Target, but mostly Wal-Mart)most of the time it's the "supercenter", and that means it's the town's grocery store, hardware store, and auto-repair shop as well.

4) the court house, the police stationthe third or fourth nicest place in town, depending on if they have a hospital. Almost always with some sort of super nice show vehicle or parked in the parking lot. One time I saw a tricked out hearse with the "DARE" logo on it once. I suppose this crap keeps the kids off drugs. Or something. Sometimes you see some ridiculous armor outfitted hum-v or what have you. One supposes for meth raids.

5) The abondoned Factory / Textile Mill / Office ParkAlmost every one of these small towns has a few decaying carcasses of their former glory. Also super depressing.

The small business that you see are BS "gift stores" that spring up in the abandoned downtown areas (where the trains used to pull in back in the day usually) probably they're just tax write offs for rich housewives, because it's literally impossible to imagine people living in these crapholes lining up to buy $30 potpourri stuffed decorative chickens and shit. But then, maybe that jail work really pays off, and they do support themselves.

Either way, that shit is not the backbone of America.And good luck starting a business in your garage and growing like an Apple or an HP today.It's impossible, because the victors have written the rules, and you'll find yourself under a completely different tax system than the large corporations.

Some fundamentals have gotta change before things get better, and it's not going to fix itself.

That's a false equivication between small business and small towns. If it posssibly can, a small business is going to setup shop in a major city for the same reason that big businesses do: access to a greater pool of potential customers and employees.

Those 50 jobs aren't the only benefits that came out of the data center.

If it costs $1billion to build that data center, then that's $1billion added to the economy, affecting a lot more people than 50 direct employees.

(How many people did it take to actually construct the place? to handle permits for construction? To deliver food for people that handle permits? To handle mail to deliver food to the people that handle permits for construction, etc..)

Short term vs Long term.... Construction of the Data center was a short term gain in employment for the region. In the long term, only 50 jobs were added, the point being, a manufacturing facility would employ more people for a longer time. A much smaller manufacturing facility, with a much smaller land and resource footprint, say 1/4 the total area, employing 100 employees, would have been a much bigger LONG TERM gain for the area.

Construction of the data center was not short term. It was yet another contract for the contractors. They are constantly needing to fill their time with a new contracts, lest they go out of business. You don't think a company just popped up out of nowhere, built the data center, then went away, do you?

The big problem is that you are talking about two very different things. You have the need for long-term jobs, and you have the need for short-term/temp jobs. Construction is a dangerous area to talk about, because for those who have a career in the construction industry, you need to have new contracts that come in so you have work AFTER each project is complete. This means you need to have a sustained environment of growth, or at least building(tearing down and then re-building would work too). So

Yeah, 1 billion might be a big number. But that number is much smaller than the total that would result from 1000
small datacenters that would provide the same capacity. Building a huge datacenter saves money, and needs fewer people to run. That's why they build things like that in the first place.

Now take all you just said and multiply it for, say, 500 people of a car factory. A value-added product, that transforms raw materials into a car. The $1B data center doesn't take any raw materials, its sole purpose is to deliver Angry Birds to your iPhone.

But hey! If it makes you better to think that a huge capital investment of $1B is better than probably $1B operating cost over 3 years for a factory that actually sells products for export (and has an expected life of 10-20 years until a complete overhaul

So what do you propose we do about this? The only idea I can think of is to artificially make our economy less efficient- similar to Japan. In Japan, there are many regulations and practices which add jobs, but are inefficient.

For example- in Japan many (most?) private homes are demolished after 20-30 years [wikipedia.org] and rebuilt on the same spot. Certainly a boon to the construction industry, but not very efficient and very costly for the homeowner. There are similar practices in Engineering and Industry- pow

from the mundane items like sewage and garbage, maintenance of roads to and from, proving electrical power, educating the children if any of the plant's workers, to providing police and fire protection.

It might be only fifty people in the facility but the support mechanism to allow such a vast process does involve hundreds if not more going forward.

who can't comprehend how expensive facilities stretching across hundreds of acres can create only 50 new jobs

Yup! Its amazing that the whole project was actually completed with only 50 local people... who now have posh jobs running the place. Actually, it would have taken far less people, but curious onlookers kept getting too close to the packed ACME Instant Data Center (tm), so Apple had to hire 49 more people to make sure the crowd stood back while a single drop of water was added to the ACME package and it expanded instantly into the glorious data center that stands there today.

who can't comprehend how expensive facilities stretching across hundreds of acres can create only 50 new jobs

Yup! Its amazing that the whole project was actually completed with only 50 local people... who now have posh jobs running the place. Actually, it would have taken far less people, but curious onlookers kept getting too close to the packed ACME Instant Data Center (tm), so Apple had to hire 49 more people to make sure the crowd stood back while a single drop of water was added to the ACME package and it expanded instantly into the glorious data center that stands there today.

Yup, and now that the $1B construction job is done, do we just ship the construction workers off to "somewhere else"?

Yup, and now that the $1B construction job is done, do we just ship the construction workers off to "somewhere else"?

You obviously have never worked in the construction trades. They don't just go down to Home Depot and pick up 200 guys from the parking lot to build a complex like this. Nor do they haul a trailer on site, put up a sign saying NOW HIRING, and wait for locals to show up with hammers and work boots. A job like this will be contracted out a large construction company, in this case Holder Construction. They then subcontract to large specialist companies for electrical, plumbing, concrete, ironwork, etc. Those s

Yup, and now that the $1B construction job is done, do we just ship the construction workers off to "somewhere else"?

My dad is a retired lineman, and he spent half his career doing electrical construction. Yes, shipping construction workers somewhere else is exactly how it's done. I didn't see much of my dad as a teeneger when he was tramping around the country building towers and stringing cable.

Even worse for many companies like Apple you have to actually sell the stock to realize any benefits from it, because Apple doesn't pay dividends. So unless you have a lot of money, you can only be a temporary owner and hope that you can stay an owner until other people want to be an owner more than you do.

How much stock do you have to own before it generates enough revenue to actually live on (never mind getting rich on)?What are the currently unemployed and / or in debt going to buy that stock with?How many companies / governments with excellent ratings have tanked, taking the investor's money with them?How much of that investment then goes towards exorbitant executive pay?

Most people don't want to gamble on making a living. They want to work and make a living.

Even the "Traditional Manufacturing Businesses" aren't employing as many people as before. It all comes down to automation. If you do something routine, simple, and repetitive, you can and will be replaced by a machine.

All the talk of how manufacturing will create jobs is just that, talk. In case you haven't noticed modern day manufacturing is automated to a very high degree and requires a lot fewer people to do the job. Robots kill jobs not only in manufacturing, but in pretty much every other employment field. Even scientific research is affected heavily by this and requires fewer people to do the same job. In one week I can do experiments that 5 years ago would have taken 10 people a full year to perform. With such throughput it isn't necessary even to formulate a hypothesis. You just test every possible variation and let the data speak for itself. Machines are more consistent than people, don't get tired, if the make mistakes the mistakes are systematic and easy to troubleshoot. Oh and recently even advanced robots have become very affordable (way cheaper than hiring humans). It is the 19th century industrial revolution all over again but this time it is affecting everybody, except politicians. Although I suspect lying can also be automated.
Now this rises the problem what to do when 30-50% of working age adults become unemployed. I can imagine how this will work in the much hated in the US 'welfare states', but the US society itself is in a lot of trouble the way it is set now.

It's more or less how it is done now in large-scale pharma research. Any idea for a plausible lead compound? Nah, we don't need no stinking ideas. We have that fancy combinatorial chemistry which let's us build huge-arse substance libraries, mostly automated, which we then throw on cell cultures, mostly automated, too. Get some Chinese post-docs on time-limited contracts to do some data mining on the results, and here we go. We are indeed in the process of automating away research scientist jobs.

The problem here is the same thing that is effecting all our decisions. We look at the top 1% (people, companies, whatever) and get angry because they have everything, and then look at the bottom 1% and get angry because they have nothing and think one must cause the other. And we completely overlook the middle.

Its the middle thats important. Because from there you can fall to the bottom too easily. Only from there can you typically rise to the top. The middle is the backbone. As mentioned already, th

Data centers have always created very few jobs due to the high level of automation in these facilities. As a result, they don't appear to be a compelling candidate for economic development incentives, which have traditionally been all about job creation. But there's a political component to this. Data centers represent far more than jobs or bricks & mortar. They have become symbols of the new economy, a tangible sign that a community is making a successful transition to the digital economy. Governors and local legislators understand the value of a press conference to announce a new project from Google, Facebook or Apple. That's why North Carolina has hit the data center trifecta [datacenterknowledge.com] with projects for all three of those companies, and continues to offer aggressive incentives for new projects. We've been tracking this trend for years, and there are more states than ever before offering incentives for data centers. That competition will intensify as the Internet continues to transform our economy, and ensure that tax incentives for data center projects are here to stay.

Large companies at first look seem to employ a lot of people. But the amount of people they employ is much smaller than you'd expect.

If a small company needs a sysadmin, accountant and receptionist, then that's 3 people that are employed. If there are 3 such companies, then each needs their own, so that's 9 people employed.

But what if they merge? All those people are probably not working at their limit at the new company. The sysadmin that managed 10 servers probably can manage 30. The new company is not so huge as to have more than one door, so only one receptionist is needed. The accountant can handle a bit more work. And so it's quite likely that 6 people will be laid off.

If the objective is creating jobs then what you want is creating inefficiency: lots of small companies that employ people below their full capacity. Large companies are experts at employing as few people as possible. If there's one thing that would be counterproductive towards that goal, it's them.

Municipalities and state governments are MORONS. There is not one reason to spend a single cent of tax incentives on a data center. They hear "Google", "Apple", "Facebook", and they have visions of hundreds of highly-paid software engineers sitting in row upon row of cubicles, and then going home to their brand-new houses, spending all their millions in local stores, etc.

Not even the companies themselves promise much in the way of jobs, but the governments aren't paying attention.

If you have finite electrical generating and grid capacity, it's far better to lure in SOME kind of manufacturing facility (they do still exist) then a data center that will book a huge portion of the output while employing a tiny handful of people that really don't get paid that much.

Just please try to think instead of vomiting nonsense for 1 second : Where does the money you got from your Apple stock comes from, and how on earth would it help the economy if everyone bought stocks ? Other than the fact that it would create a buble that would inflate your own stock for a short period of time.

Stock market doesn't create money or value, it swaps money from one pocket to another, and some people are so good at swapping money from others pockets to theirs that they become very rich.
In the old days that was called robbery, but now that it's based on whether you got the info first instead of whether you have a gun or not, it's become legit and morally OK ?
Same principle, different mechanisms.

"In fact, Apple actually exemplifies some of the reasons why the U.S. has such huge unemployment and inequality problems: 'Digital' businesses like Apple employ far fewer people than traditional manufacturing businesses"
That's quite a reach, to say Apple only needs X people, therefore this is a contributing factor to unemployment and inequality.

I can say for certainty that until someone actually provides hard numbers (i.e; X sysadmins, X maintenance, X Site Services or what have you), this article is just FUD. It serves no purpose other than to demean a company that actually created some jobs in a totally DEAD area.

And since I live in the area where this DC is located, I can tell you, the area is beyond dead. I had a conversation with a business owner in Lincolnton, NC (about 10m from Maiden, and here was his exact response about the area being dead;

"We are hoping to get some manufacturing jobs out here........"

Brilliant game plan there.....If this area of NC wants jobs, they need to go after markets that haven't dried up already. Manufacturing will ONLY come back with proper tax\legislation policy, not on wishful thinking.

is that many states have their own absurd regulatory systems. For example, in many states you have to be "certified" to be a "professional hair braider." Even most pro-government liberals are probably spitting up their coffee hearing that you have to get a license that says you're competent to braid hair and can get fined or locked up for not having it, but it's really there. Same with interior decorating. Yes, interior decorating, not design (which has some architectural components).

What is needed is a top-down audit with a prejudicial eye to remove regulations unless their absence would cause a clear and present danger to life, limb, property or the environment if removed. Virtually all professional licensing needs to be tossed, including for the legal profession. Part of the problem we have today with students bankrupting themselves at law school is because many states make it so that you can't sit for the bar unless you have a law degree (autodidacts need not apply!)

It's a little known fact that many of the southern states are actually as regulation happy as the northern states. The main difference is our taxes tend to be lower and we're (AFAIK) right to work across the board. North Carolina is struggling in no small part because they have long had a profligate political system and a peculiar good ol' boy style of being selectively hostile to economic freedom.

Note: What I am about to say remains true even for other companies, I just present things specific to Apple....

You only see 50 jobs from Apple for a data center. But what about:

* All of the construction jobs when building out the center.* All of the revenue from shippers going through nearby towns to and from the data center with supplies and equipment.* More abstractly, the side benefits of helping Apple grow. If you are helping a large company like Apple gain something, leverage that - you could put together incentives to convince iOS app developers to live in your town, or offer free training to those interested to learn iPhone development. Then you can help ride the tide of a rising Apple.* Also did they bargain to have Apple put in an Apple store locally (don't know if they have one already or not). That helps local revenue and residents alike.

Basically I think it's short-sighted to complain about a low number of jobs when you can derive other benefits, plus as noted get the one-time benefits of construction related revenue.

The construction workers were likely with firms already. This was just another job for them, it may have kept them from being laid off but any hiring this job created would've been strictly temporary and may not have been local (large outside construction firm brought in because they can do the work cheaper). Materials likewise probably weren't bought locally, the construction company probably has national supply contracts.

Not much revenue from truck drivers. They stop for lunch and that's about it.

Currently it is impossible to make another Apple. The current business model is to think of something unique, patent it, and get bought by Apple/Microsoft/Google/Samsung/IBM/Someone Big. Reason being, patents.

You need a patent "war chest" to fight off these big guys and survive in their ecosystem. Typically by buying smaller companies that have patent portfolios already. To get that you need cash. And to get that kind of cash, you already have to be gigantic.

This is why none of these large players are pushing for patent reform. If software patents were to go away the ecosystem would open up and the big companies would have to face new competition.

The same can be said for the so-called "Green economy." The green economy is also going to be highly automated. Obama is doing disservice by preaching job creation through green jobs. In fact, I'd wager much of the manufacturing behind green products will eventually go overseas to save money. My guess is we will never really see low unemployment again. The US population is too large for the economy and resources to really handle. As more and more industries automate, the baseline unemployment figures will continue to rise.

Maybe that comes from the fact that Asians are not as lazy and against "stupid jobs" (when they are in fact the most useful ones) as Americans?

A quick google search reveals the average manufacturing job in China pays $134 per month. It has little to do with laziness or stupid jobs, its simple economics.

Exactly. People are so quick to comment on "lazy" Americans, and yet fail to realize that unless you're willing to bring manufacturing to the US and increase the price of everything at least 300%, manufacturing will likely stay in parts of the world where it can be done the cheapest. Even if you found a willing worker, you'd be hard-pressed to survive anywhere in the US on $134 per month.

Don't forget that the the labor *costs* go up, but the cost of transporting the goods goes way down.

People manufacture outside the US because it's not as strictly regulated and companies don't give a shit about following rules, laws, etc that they cannot have drafted themselves. It's not a "cheaper" issue, not in the long run, nor has it ever been.

This isn't really an American thing but rather certain states or cities. I can assure you out here you wouldn't have fees that high.
The problem is people look at over-regulation and regulative capture at the Federal level when typically the real problems are at the state, municipality and city level. Unfortunately while people become very riled up over national politics most people are completely ignorant at what happens at the local level. Yet arguably that sort of thing has a much bigger effect on peopl

you're talking about infrastructure costs, not the costs to go into business.

In a large majority of the united states, the cost to register a business is somewhere in the range of $200-400 maximum.

The cost to go into business could be astronomical or it could be near zero due to a wholly digital business. Any example you make here is simply full of shit because it doesn't reflect on the range being anything from near zero to billions of dollars.

Your examples for based on a restaurant, which is one of the most notoriously bad businesses to open with a really really high rate of failure. Long story short on opening a restaurant: if you aren't a professionally trained chef, don't try to open a restaurant. Fees, are something that should be calculated for. If you can't handle the fees, then the problem is the *business you're trying to open*, not the fees. In the US, a lot of these fees are for safety regulations. China doesn't have those problems because they don't have those regulations, simple. I'm not going to get into "better" or "worse" or the bureaucracy of it.

Continental and Bridgestone and other FOREIGN manufacturers bringing manufacturing to the US to the tune of thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars invested. BMW make cars in the US and sell them in MAINLAND CHINA. Caterpillar has massive export sales.

"manufacturing will likely stay in parts of the world where it can be done the cheapest"

Tiny (compared to the US and China) GERMANY is the WORLDS SECOND LARGEST EXPORTER.

Hello, that's with high wages, UNIONS, socialized medical care, and Autobahns as contrasted with US practice. They also have more sexual freedom, real beer, and much less superstition/religion.

When I arrived at Sembach AB in 1981, the Luftwaffe officer speaking during newcomers orientation spoke English flawlessly and much more clearly than the American who preceded him.

US primary education is shit because the public LIKE it that way so they won't feel threatened by their offspring turning out more capable than they are. Forget the charges of manipulation by the elites who supposedly want an ignorant public. The PUBLIC want to be ignorant.Ignorance is COMFORTABLE. See "religion".

Nah.While I like microbrewed beers and ales, a Sierra Nevada pale ale tastes about like a Red Hook pale ale which tastes about like a Deschutes Brewery pale ale which... same for porters, stouts, hefeweizens, etc...

Granted, they are all far more enjoyable to drink than BudCoorsMiller or TecateSolCorona dreck.

But I'm amazed every time I drink a different German (or Czech or Belgian) beer or ale. Even amongst the same style of beer or ale, they each taste...unique.

Who the fuck was talking about Budweiser and Miller? Why the fuck would you even bring them up in a discussion about 'real beer'?

Because, by volume [beerinfo.com], American's are drinking the crap that you don't think should be mentioned in a discussion with real beer.

And, quite frankly, if you look at the top beers of 2011 [worldbeerawards.com], other than Sam Adams, I'm not recognizing a lot of American breweries... enough to make me refute the assertion that America has better beer than Germany, starting with pointing out Budweiser and Mil

Have you actually been to Germany?? There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of regional beers. There are monasteries that have unique brews. There are many brands that are found only in a single city! There are more styles of beer than you can possibly name.

There are definitely some great beers in the US and there is a lot more choice than there used to be. I'd still say that if you walked into a bar and ordered a beer at random that the odds of getting something really enjoyable are much higher in Germany than in the US.

Exactly. People are so quick to comment on "lazy" Americans, and yet fail to realize that unless you're willing to bring manufacturing to the US and increase the price of everything at least 300%, manufacturing will likely stay in parts of the world where it can be done the cheapest. Even if you found a willing worker, you'd be hard-pressed to survive anywhere in the US on $134 per month.

This is why I'm so amused when people say the reason jobs are moving to Chine is because of "the unions". As if a union bringing wages from $16/hr to $19/hr is going to matter when you've got people in China making $134/month.

Plus, in China nobody's going to mind if you pour the toxic waste from your fabricating plant into the water supply.

It's going to be interesting to see what China looks like as it becomes the ultimate corporate state. Let's see what they look like after all the "John Galts" have their way with it for another decade.

Hogwash. The cost portion of a given manufactured item that goes toward manufacturing labor is typically only about 1/3 of the product price. The rest is shipping, distribution, storage, marketing, stocking, transfer markups, etc.

Thus, if the factory workers' wages in the US were twice what they are in China, then the store price of a $3 item would be about $4.

You're making two very poor assumptions; one, that factory worker's wages in the US are merely twice that of such wages in China. In fact, they are

The management of businesses in the US and the first world make it seem like the Asians are all hardworking geniuses and that is why all the work is being outsourced to Asia - but the truth is that the work is only being farmed out because the salaries in Asia are much lower than in the first world.

The truth be told, for the most part, the Asians aren't as skilled or as educated as their western counterparts. Not to say that Asians don't have degrees - there may in fact be more Asians with postgraduate degrees than the first world.. and not that Asians are stupid or lazy either.

It is just that the educational institutions in most Asian nations are there simply to hand out degrees not an education. In the west, a lot of students take up courses because they enjoy the subject - but most Asian students take up courses with a view of getting a high paying job - with very little interest in the subject. And this impacts the quality of their skill and also their overall understanding of the subject.

By the way, when I say Asians, I am also including Indians into this - we are also part of Asia.

A quick google search reveals the average manufacturing job in China pays $134 per month. It has little to do with laziness or stupid jobs, its simple economics.

I think it's important to point out how US-centric this article is. People in China need jobs too. They apparently need them so badly, they are willing to work for $134 per month. The jobs go to those that need them the most, those that will take the lowest pay. Americans simply don't need those jobs bad enough, even if they are unemployed. Our standard of living is too high.

I only see a few ways out of this situation:
1. Return to protectionist policies. [wikipedia.org]
2. Create enough growth to saturate the economies of the third world and raise their standard of living. (The ultimate goal IMHO)
3. Reduce the standard of living in the US to remain competitive with the third world. (Hint: this plan will not be popular)

Why should U.S. be in the business of providing jobs to citizens of China?

Who says we are? We aren't in the business of providing anyone jobs. We're in the business to make money.

Would you rather pay a premium to buy American products and watch news stories about starving children in third world countries (you do donate to those children...don't you?), or would you rather put those children's parents to work making your iProduct?

People tend not to care about other people an ocean away because we don't see them every day. However, they are people too. Just because they don

The rate of suicides at Foxconn (14 in a year and a half out of 920,000) was lower than the country as a whole by an order of magnitude (19.5 per 100,000). The whole thing was blown way out of proportion by the media.

Maybe that comes from the fact that Asians are not as lazy and against "stupid jobs" (when they are in fact the most useful ones) as Americans?

So many citations needed here. Okay so you say "the fact" and I'm asking you where you get your "facts."

You say that Asians have this awesome work ethic and will do all the dirty work? How do you prove that? If you go by GDP per capita, I think the US is doing alright comparatively [wikipedia.org].

Could you please prove that Americans are against "stupid jobs?" I used to pick rock, bail hay, bus tables, work at a parking booth, etc. Now I code computers. There's my pitiful sample set of "one" please send me your numbers that prove it is applicable to all Americans. I think a lot of Americans working in the middle of nowhere get overlooked by people like you.

When you say "(when they are in fact the most useful ones)" I question how objective the superlative "most useful" is here. The factory worker, the quality control worker, the designer, the investors, etc. They all have a use. Which is "most useful" is totally a matter of opinion. The question I have for you is, do you think that Apple would just stop making iPhones if they were suddenly not allowed to import them from China? I highly doubt it.

I challenge you to grow up and to stop relying on tired stereotypes.

It applies to work, woman and everything. Everyone is selfish and looking for their own good, in a way or another.

So what you're saying is that you've learned that there is no place for love or satisfaction of a job well done? Just money? I'm really really sad you find yourself in that position... keep manipulating your wife based on her greed. You know what else Americans are good at? Divorce [divorcerate.org].

How about if people crying about "there are no jobs for me" would either make new products or services people want or improve themselves to be more useful to employers? But nooo, now they're crying how no one is giving money for what they think they want to do.

Actually, the people Google sent be interviewed for the one article did just that, but unlike you, they recognize that asking a 50 year old guy who's been working in Furniture manufacturing to learn computers so he can get a new job is pretty futile. Most companies won't hire him because he's too old with too little experience.

It becomes an interesting question of what percentile of people do we allow to become permanently unemployed. Is it the bottom 10%? 20%? And what do we do with the least useful people? Do we give them enough money to survive or do we do as the Libertarians suggest and let them die from the crime of not being useful enough?

The point of the article is that the U.S. would need more Apples than it could possibly sustain to fix it's employment problems. The U.S. needs to have some manufacturing jobs because there a lot of people who are more suited to that work than to other jobs. This might seem like a problem of not adapting, but it's just a problem of numbers. Why would anyone want to hire someone from the bottom 50% of applicants for any job? The way to deal with this is to have a robust and diversified field of employers. The U.S. has failed to protect most of it's manufacturing industry from MBA idiocy that considers a hiring a Chinese company to do work inherently superior to employing Americans.

Such companies that hire an inexperienced young person but don't hire an equally inexperienced older person may find themselves in violation of the Age Discrimination Act of 1975 [dol.gov] or foreign counterparts.

Yes but unless the HR folks are dumb enough to outright state it's because of his age, it's very difficult to prove age discrimination, all they have to do is point to his resume and say "The reason we didn't choose that particular candidate is that he doesn't have the requisite skills for the position."
Case Dismissed.

"Do we give them enough money to survive or do we do as the Libertarians suggest and let them die from the crime of not being useful enough?"

In your example, I think Libertarians would suggest he start his own business of hand-made furniture and charge 100x the standard IKEA rate for hand-quality work, also they would have suggested, if possible, he did something to save for retirement (or have his house paid off so minimal expenses.. so on)... note the 'if possible' part.. it's not possible for everyone..

So the Treo was a dumbphone? I had that before Apple's iPhone. I had a SonyErricson smart phone before the iPhone. The Sony phone had pretty good speech recognition, too. The Android phone has been a hotbed of innovation without any patent protection and they executed the product rather well with plenty of money behind it.

You seem to be making a giant assumption about whether or not a company would execute on the idea of a smart phone without patents. There is no conclusive evidence that innovation would fa

I'd say the bigger problem is what to do with all the people now that capitalism has nearly run its course and will simply no longer function as a system except for the top 10%.

Think about it: What IS capitalism? At its core it is trading labor for capital, simple right? But what if your labor is simply no longer required? What do you do then? Are you gonna pack all the manual laborers up and ship them to China and India? I doubt very much they'd take them. What we have here now is something simply never be

This is nonsense. Labor is typically quite a small part of the cost of electronic products. (In fact, before the rise of China automated assembly was doing very well, but Chinese labor undercut it and the products were redesigned for manual assembly. I actually costed one product line that had been largely automated and discovered that hand assembly in China cost almost exactly the same. But the company owners regarded "manufacturing in China" as some kind of dick-swinging club that they aspired to join. Yet products could easily be redesigned for automation again.)

You underestimate how little money companies are prepared to save by betraying their countries.

They'd be far more likely to buy a $700 iPod if they had a job that afforded them that kind of disposable income.

The whole "we can't afford to manufacture in the United States" idea is completely contrary to our own history. For decades we made most of our shit here, and consequently there were decent paying jobs to be had by most anyone with any skill level. Those jobs afforded those employees to buy the shit they were making, which is the fundamental problem we have today...wages have completely stagnated. People can't afford to buy the shit, even when it's made in China for pennies on the dollar. The race to the bottom has finally trickled up to the point where they're killing off their own customers.

Back in then 60's, my grandfather drove a truck for a living and supported himself, his wife, their four children, paid off a modest home for them to live in, had a new car in the driveway every few years, had enough scratch to pile the kids into said car every year to take them around the country on vacation, as well as put money aside for retirement and the kids college fund. The man barely had a high school education due to running off to fight in Korea and do his duty like those that had just a few years earlier in World War II.

This was possible because he wasn't competing with people on the other side of the world living in 3rd world conditions for his job. This was also possible because his boss was also a vet, as were all of his co-workers, and they would not tolerate one of their own being fucked over that way. He brought the boss home for dinner, the boss came to visit him when he was in the hospital. Point is, they actually gave a shit about each other beyond their ability to profit off of the labors of each other.

That $700 iPod isn't scary to someone that has a decent job. Paying the guys on the factory floor a decent wage allows them to buy the shit they're making, which leads to more demand for the product, which leads to more decent-paying jobs. This leads to a stronger economy, which increases the value of a dollar, which leads to lower prices. What it doesn't lead to, though, is ridiculous lopsided bonuses and salaries for the handful of people running things at the top.

In our grandfather's day, if their employer had brought in illegals or foreigners to work their line, paying them less in order to pad their own paychecks, there would have been a shit storm. They would have been shunned in the community, their products boycotted, and they likely would have had investigations into their business practices. But more importantly, most of those employers wouldn't have done it anyway, because they cared just as much about their country as their employees. That's something we lost in the drive for globalization and ever increasing profit margins.

The fallacy of trickle-down economics is why our country is sitting on the edge of a cliff right now. It took 30 years to fully flower, but we're finally hitting the point where even making shit in China isn't cheap enough due to inflation and the ridiculously stagnated wages we've been suffering under since this voodoo economics bullshit started. When less and less of us are able to justify the expense of an iPod at any price, where does that leave Apple (or any other manufacturer)?

That's not the answer. People forget that third world economies are different from first world economies. You can pay a third worlder less. When I was stationed in Thailand in 1974, it was a third world country with a median income of $1,000 per year. But you could rent a bungalow (woman included) for $30, feed four at a nice restaraunt for under a dollar (including expensive American soda), take a bus anywhere in the country for a nickle. They weren't really that poor. Likewise, I'm twice as rich as someone living 200 miles away in Chicago who earns the same wage as me, because verything cost twice as much up there.

What the world needs is for these people to be unionized. Management bargains collectively with you alone, you have no power. They bargain collectively with your own collective, now you have power.

Do you like your 40 hour workweek, sick time, vacations? Thank the unions.

Yep. The world is connected by the intertubes.

That always makes me laugh. Computers haven't had tubes for over fifty years! And to us geezers, and innertube was inside a car's tire.